I heard a noise in the room as of someone mockingly scoffing. Otherwise, the class was silent, unmoving.
“Go ahead,” I said. “You all can leave. Class is dismissed.”
“But there’s still an hour left.”
“Well, enjoy the extra time. The story’s been told, so class is over.”
Everyone left. I watched Ishmael walk away, green book held in his hand.
I went home, too.
I opened the door my father had opened. I wiped the thin line of dust off the top of the frame in which my mother blushed. I walked down the hallway my father walked down, walked into the study that had been his study. I sat down in the chair in the room whose walls once vibrated with his voice, his song; I thought I could hear in the air a low hum as if the walls were vibrating still.
I turned the postcard over. Underneath Orpheus’s severed head three stars darkly shone. I was one of those stars. My son was another. And the third, Lydia—whose light still cut across infinite distance though its source long ago had been expired.
The finished novel thick in the middle of the desk—in it I wrote my father’s cenotaph. Wrote his failure. Buried him in it. Buried him in the names.
I looked at the thick stack of pages, and I felt ashamed.
I turned the title page over, and began to read. I learned to be a quiet child. I read the sentence, and then I crossed it out.
I learned to be a quiet child.
I read the next sentence, and crossed it out, too. And I kept reading, sentence by sentence, crossing each one out. I had, I thought, woven it wrongly—all of it.
The hours passed. The sun set. Night’s dark line crossed out the day. My fingertips hurt from holding the pen, my thumb indented, thumbprint erased.
I thought I could hear it, as I dragged my pen across the words I read. I thought I could hear the earth rolling in its rut. They sound the same. A starling sang its mimic-song: creak of a door closing, creak of an old branch in the wind, stolen notes of the cardinal’s crystalline call. The starlings’ breasts mottled with stars, pale dots against the metallic black sheen of feathers—I watched them in the moonlight, stalking through the grass, yellow beaks cracked open.
I read the end of the last sentence: the man stopped speaking, stood up, and turned his face away to the wall.
How had I become that man?
I crossed it out: the man stopped speaking, stood up, and turned his face away to the wall.
The pages littered the floor. My finger and thumb throbbed, ached. I could feel the bones inside them.
The only page left on the desk was the title page, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky written in red ink across a musical staff. I turned the page over, the dark lines of the musical staff faint but still visible.
I picked up my pen.
When my mother and sister died, my father learned to sing.
He learned the words to a heroic song, and when he sang he became a hero.
He travelled by ship to an island where an old man helped him sing.
My father and the old man sang together this heroic song.
The song opened a door between our world and another, the world where the dead wait, looking always up into the air above them. The song changed the floor into ocean, and my father swam down, singing as he swam, never taking a breath, to the ocean’s bottom.
There he stood and peered into a vast chasm. He saw the vertebrae of a giant whale, and he saw that whale’s giant jaws. And sitting in those jaws he saw his wife, and in his wife’s arms, his baby daughter.
He sang to them and they heard his song. They swam up to him, following him as he sang, following him up through the sea, which they mistook for air; they followed his song whose words bubbled upward. My father—he never looked back. He only sang.
And then the ocean became a floor underneath his feet. Then my father stopped singing, and the old man stopped singing, too. Then his baby daughter took a breath and cried. Father turned around, just then he turned around, and there in his eyes were his wife and child.
The old man said, You must forget this song.
My father said, It is forgotten.
Some time passed, and that time was silent.
There was a knock on my door. I was a little boy, not a man. I sat on my bed reading my father’s letters when I heard a knock on my door. And when I opened it my mother knelt down before me, her arms open, her face no longer looking down. Behind her stood my father, humming quietly to the baby to keep her calm, to keep her calm as she drifted off to that other world of dreams and danger, to calm her as she drifted off to sleep.
And then I put the pen down. I rested it on the page.
I went upstairs, and to drift off to that other world of dreams and danger, to drift off to sleep.
CHAPTER 9
I WOKE UP LATE. SUCH A SIMPLE SENTENCE. I WOKE UP late and went to school.
My office door stood wide open. I walked in. Nothing was missing.
On my desk, in the very middle of it, some pages stapled together. I sat down on my desk and picked it up. Handwritten at the top in blue ink: Here is my paper—Ishmael.
The children who sat in the desks in that school forgot everything as soon as they learned it. In the afternoons the hill’s giant shadow fell over the school—a heartless shadow—and the morning’s lessons, what two apples added to two apples equals, what the names of the shapes on the map were, all disappeared. The teacher didn’t notice that anything was wrong, for she would forget herself what she taught.
When the children went home they were quieter than when they left. It was a quiet their parents appreciated, which made them quiet as well.
The children would go to school and forget more and more of what they had known of the world.
Many things struck them all as beautiful, the teacher and the students. A golden butterfly flew in the open window and fluttered around the room in widening circles, a butterfly that seemed to glow. It landed on the finger of one boy who held his finger out, but the glow dimmed, and the butterfly flew weakly away.
Eventually there were no words left that any of the children could remember, and their parents remembered only a few—their child’s name, perhaps, or perhaps their own.
One day, before the school bell rang, the children wandered out of the schoolhouse. They wandered out only because the door had been left open. They walked past their parents even as their parents called out their names. They had no names they knew. Each child wandered off in his or her own direction, they didn’t know to follow each other.
The boy on whose finger the butterfly had landed walked through a field of goldenrod. Bees as big as thumbs hummed as they worked, and the boy heard this, and he hummed too. He hummed as he wandered through the field.
He walked across the field and into the woods where the jack-in-the-pulpit grows. The forest was dark but the boy had forgotten how to be afraid.
He saw a little glow shining from a hole in the ground and he walked over to it and looked in. There in the bottom of it was the golden butterfly glowing, but when the boy reached down to touch it, it flew up beyond his reach, and circled in widening circles around him.
A fragment of the butterfly’s wing had broken off, and glowed golden in the dirt. The boy reached for it but it always seemed below his grasp, so that without knowing he was doing so, the boy dug the hole deeper, dug until he was standing inside the hole he was digging, and then the fragment was in his hand, and he dug no more. The glow went out as soon as he held it. But something else glowed, a pale white glow. The boy bent down and picked up a rock. It was a white rock, a crystal rock, a quartz. It felt warm in the boy’s hand, and gently pulsed. The boy closed his hand around it and felt it beat warmly in his hand.
The butterfly ceased its circling and landed on the boy’s shoulder. He looked at it, and when it flew away, he followed it. He climbed out the hole with rock in hand and followed its golden light through the dark woods, followed it through the field of goldenrod
where the bees slept inside their blooms. He followed it all the way to his school, and up the hill that stood next to the school. The sun was rising, but the boy didn’t know the difference between night and day. He followed the butterfly up the hill to a little spring, a little spring in the middle of a little pond. The butterfly dipped down and touched the water, flew up and over to the boy and gently touched his hand that held the beating rock. The butterfly repeated this over and over again, until a dim thought grew bright in the forgetful boy’s head.
The boy threw the stone into the pond, into the spring, and it disappeared with a splash. The butterfly flew in front of the boy’s face and glowed so brightly the boy had to close his eyes. He heard himself say, “Too bright.” These are the first words the boy remembers ever saying.
Somewhere the hill that was a giant opened his eyes, and his eyes grew wider. He didn’t stand up, he didn’t wander off. The giant only opened his eyes and watched. He saw the schoolhouse beside him. He felt the boy walking down his back.
At every step the boy remembered another word, but they were dim words, unconnected to anything he saw, anything in the world. He kept repeating to himself, “and and and.”
And when he had walked down the hill he found himself by habit walking home. He knew it was his home when he saw it. He knocked on the door and when the door opened he saw a man who bent down and opened his arms and looked at him.
Then the boy remembered, and he said one word. The boy said, “Father.”
I put the paper down and walked to my office window.
I could see the yellow lawn and the leafless trees through the transparent reflection of my own face. Through my own face I could see the pale sky, so very pale, blank as a page, and I thought to myself, too bright, too bright.
“Father,” I said.
And my own face said “Father” back to me.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & NOTES
IT HAS BEEN MY CONTINUOUS LUCK TO HAVE TWO OLD FRIENDS as primary readers for nearly every word I’ve written, and their attention to this book both encouraged me to keep writing it, and made it better than it would have been left to my hands alone: thank you Sally Keith and Srikanth Reddy. Much of the novel was pondered and put together while running many miles with Michael Lundblad, and his patience in listening to me talk as we trained for a marathon was an attention greatly needed, and I hope reflected in the book itself. Thank you to my father, and to Agelia Dumas, for reading drafts of the book and offering support and advice in return; thank you to my mother for the same. Thank you to Chris Fischbach and everyone at Coffee House Press. Thank you to Laird Hunt for publishing Book III, Chapter 6 in the Denver Quarterly. Lastly, but a circular last so that it is always also the beginning, thank you to Iris, Hana, and Kristy, who in me exert such a tow that image reverts back to substance, and that substance is home.
The poet who falls into and through the volcano is in memory of Craig Arnold.
Many other books wend their way through the fabric of this one, a tribute and a study of those works and writers I most love. Readers of this book will find echoes in homage to Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, John Berryman, John Bunyan, T. S. Eliot, Henry David Thoreau, William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George MacDonald, Walter Benjamin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, among others.
COLOPHON
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky
was designed at Coffee House Press,
in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s
Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis.
The text is set in Bembo.
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
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FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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